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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Headline is right. Nothing can substitute quant ability. Both in terms of what it gives you professionally, but also in terms of the depth of the world you can explore. Go and talk to someone who isn't on the mathy side of nerdness. It is as if an entire world is missing, and not just missing. I don't know much about the history some particular country, but I can catch a curiosity and read a book about it just from wondering. Most people will not have heard of complex numbers, and will not think to look it up.

About the football, I think CTE issue is going to balloon in the coming years. In the UK there's a Rugby World Cup winner who can't remember winning it. Parents are wise to observe the decisions of a guy who would have been paid millions a year but chose not to, in order to preserve his mind. It's unfortunate because gridiron is a fascinating sport.

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I think you should talk to more people who aren't on the mathy side of nerdiness. And try to really relate with them.

You're not wrong, but it's hard not to feel bad for people who bucket others into such confining batches. You'll miss out on so many friendships if you think that way.

There's no special insight needed for being able to appreciate good company, or to play guitar together. And I think a good guitarist can explore as many interesting facets of the world as the best mathematician. Complex numbers to a guitarist may as well be frets on a fretboard to a quant who doesn't play.

I'm a former professional musician and guitarist, whose music has been heard by millions of people, and now a principal software engineer.

IMHO, you have it backwards: the best guitarists explore as many interesting facets of the world as a good mathematician.

(Cool! Also, I'm a bit confused, because that sounds like exactly what I said. Though I like yours better, since it quantifies "best guitarist" rather than "good guitarist".)

The sound of a plucked guitar string probably ought to be expressed with chiplets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirplet_transform

You could also use a physics-based model. That has lots of math, including calculus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_vibration

I'm not sure what it takes to appreciate good company, but graph theory and statistics seem likely. You'd have to model the social network somehow. Facebook and Twitter would know more.

The social graph for the company of a single person will have a very low degree. I don't think you can do much statistics with it?

Troy Aikman has no memory of playing in the 1994 NFC Championship game. He had ten concussions in his career, and probably more than weren't detected.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/02/03...

What does it even mean to "think quantitatively"? I am so lost.

At this point we should probably clarify that the hackernews title was originally based on the subheading:

>Being capable of thinking quantitatively — it’s the single most important thing

> Go and talk to someone who isn't on the mathy side of nerdness. It is as if an entire world is missing, and not just missing.

That’s not really fair. Someone who doesn’t like to dance? Entire world missing. Only speaks a single language? Doesn’t really appreciate or enjoy food? Worlds missing.

Doesn’t know a lot about music or art? Has poor emotional intelligence? Enjoys history but not literature?

Worlds missing.

Only socialized in a real way with people like them? World missing.

I can go on. But yeah, quantitative skills are important, and yeah the world is big. It’s even bigger than math.

It was Heinlein who said: " “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I like that, even if his politics are problematic.

You're right. But all of those things are things you can do something about, because you've heard of them.

Just saying there's a lot of things in the math world that if you didn't put down a stake early on, you won't know that you don't know them.

> ...you won't know that you don't know them.

But this is true of many (all?) fields, not just quantitative. For example, recently I've been learning ancient Hebrew and one of the things I learned early on was that it (like Arabic) has a "dual number" which is in a similar grammatical category to English singular and plural, but implies the things usually come in pairs, like hands and eyes. It uses this construct to refer to "the heavens" in Genesis, which immediately raises the question of why ancient Hebrew cosmology identified "the heavens" as dual in number.

There's something I didn't even know I didn't know until I started into the field.

Nobody is saying that these things can't happen in other fields, just that math stuff has a certain cavernous quality that is more common in that area than most.

English and Germanic have vestiges of dual number, it's pretty interesting. Like the word "both", it seems like a weird thing to have in a language that normally is single/plural. I came across it because I was reading about languages at one point, but all I used to get there was just ordinary reading. Yes, I didn't hear about it until I heard about it, but I also wasn't prevented from learning this little tidbit from a lack of supporting knowledge. By contrast, there are areas of math that would take me years to even understand what the research questions are.

> just that math stuff has a certain cavernous quality that is more common in that area than most ...

Hahahaha you clearly don’t know how much you don’t know about art, music, philosophy, ummm psychology.

Sorry to be a bit mean but come on man .... :).

I’m not denying that math isn’t special in certain ways. It is.

And you could even make arguments about the mathematical nature of music.

But man, to be a serious classical musician or serious jazz musician you have to study and practice your entire life since childhood. Just to have a running.

You wanna get good? Achieve mastery and knowledge? Compose work in dialogue with the great work of the past? Would take you years just to get started.

Or Picasso. His father? A painter. He was literally born into it.

I encourage you to read some good biographies of some artists.

Or even a biography on say, Winston Churchill. Or Lincoln. True political / leadership skill takes a lifetime of study and acquiring experience.

To pick more examples of obviously challenging and cavernous non-math stuff, have you read any Thomas Pynchon, Don deLilo, or David Foster Wallace? Or James Joyce or Samuel Beckett?

Or Homer, for gods sakes. Or the Bible, the Koran, the Old Testament, the Tao Te Ching?

Allow for creative, rational thought which is less precise but more complex than pure logic or math (ie allow for human fucking language), and you get what is maybe the deepest cavern there is.

You underestimate both the time and effort needed to gain a real understanding of literature and art, and, to create it on a high level. And all the fields of human experience which we are unable to completely describe our understanding of via mathematics.

As someone else said, math is hard because it is easy. Humanities are easy because they are hard.

"Single most important", even if technically true, can also be misleading.

Yup. I have a problem with “single most important”

Getting hung up on words is a thing with some people. Not everything can be put into words and have it stick for all time. Things change. Dogma emerges. Impermanence happens.

"Is the single most important thing" is plainly hyperbole. For instance, that statement cannot be unconditional. If a bus is barreling towards you, the single most important thing is to get out of the way of that bus. No time to measure it, measure its velocity, calculate the rate at which you need to move. The single most important thing is to get moving now.

As a mathematician, I read that headline and say "what are your axioms?" And that's a quantitative response to that qualitative headline, so no apologies.

If one is thrown in front of a bus, one is probably not going to use any words to remove themselves from the path of the bus. Hyperbole is all about words, but the author was speaking about what is the single most important thing to thinking, which means their thinking, not yours or mine.

Pointing out that someone else is aimlessly pointing out "errors" gets downvotes, apparently. That would be a hypothesis.

Curiously "single most important" is a qualitative value statement, masquerading as a quantitative statement: it implies a rank-ordering of Most Important Things. But there are no measurable, quantifiable units attached to such a list, nor could there be.

It's probably not fair to indict too strongly on this phrase; people use exaggerated language all the time ("X is the best" to mean "X is very very good"), and so reading it as "thinking quantitatively is very very important" seems appropriate.

Nonetheless, as valuable as quantitative thinking is, it has (immeasurable) diminishing returns. It can never be more than a tool to realize our qualitative human values. Somewhere we have to "cash out" the numbers into things we care about, which don't have numbers attached: human dignity; individual autonomy; the look of joy in a child's eyes; the emotional security of family and friends; etc.

For sure however...

> It's probably not fair to indict too strongly on this phrase; people use exaggerated language all the time ("X is the best" to mean "X is very very good"), and so reading it as "thinking quantitatively is very very important" seems appropriate.

To me, the point isn't about pedantic enforcement of grammar and linguistics, but more so about to underlying thinking that this use of language suggests. To what extent does lazy/imprecise/presumptive/forgiving communication and thinking permeate the systems that implement our incredibly technically advanced advanced societies, where it is simultaneously common to find people who smell like pee sleeping on the sidewalk, and hardly anyone bats an eye, or finds the situation even remotely curious?

This comment isn't directed at you, it's just more of an esoteric observation.

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